- Different kinds of information about nonprofits in Ireland
- Organisation name
- Organisation URL
- Nonprofits classification
- Purpose
- Directors/trustees
- Further questions, concerns, ideas
Different kinds of information about nonprofits in Ireland
Benefacts draws on various public sources of regulatory data about Irish nonprofit organisations, and it adds some information as well.
Organisation name
Many organisations trade under a few different names. In many cases, these are registered business names, and Benefacts is able to capture these from the Companies Registration Office (CRO) or another public register. These are listed on benefacts.ie under the heading “Other Registered Names”.
If you can’t find a nonprofit organisation in our database, it could be because the name or acronym you know it by hasn’t been formally registered.
If this is an organisation you are responsible for and you would like to pass on an additional name, please contact us and we will include it as a search term in our database – this means people will find you even if you haven’t registered your organisation’s acronym, or the nickname by which it’s commonly known.
Organisation URL
Benefacts has searched for and found a web-link for many of the nonprofits in this database. Sometimes, this is a Facebook page, sometimes we couldn’t find a URL, or we have found several and we’re not certain which is the right one.
We provide this link as a service to the sector but if we have the address wrong, or you are unhappy about your organisation’s web address being listed on our website please contact us and we will change or remove it.
Alternatively, if there’s no website link on your organisation’s listing and you would like to provide one, please contact us.
Benefacts will sweep its database periodically, to remove redundant web-links.
Nonprofits classification
Benefacts classifies every organanisation in its database as an aid to greater public understanding and, support for trend analysis including transnational comparison. Where a secondary classification would help to describe the organisation’s purposes better, we assign one.
The evidence for how an organisation should be classified usually comes from the statement of its purpose in its own constitution, or the declaration it makes to the Charities Regulatory Authority (CRA) – but sometimes this is out of date. Or we get it wrong.
We believe that classification is an important process and we are keen to get it right. Please contact us if you think your organisation has not been correctly classified by Benefacts.
Purpose
Every organisation that qualifies for inclusion has a purpose that identifies it as being within the scope of the Benefacts database.
In many cases, this statement of purpose is in the public domain – because it is provided at the head of the nonprofit company’s constitution, or because the nonprofit is a charity and has told the Charities Regulatory Authority (CRA) what their purpose is.
Where the nonprofit is incorporated, Benefacts extracts this information from legal documents, some of which were produced many years ago. This means the language can be quite formal, even antiquated.
Where it’s available, the document from which the information has been extracted is provided at the footer of each webpage, so you can verify it and learn more about the organisation’s constitutional structure and rules, if you’re interested.
If you have any concerns about how the purpose of your organisation has been represented on benefacts.ie, please contact us.
Directors/trustees
Every company in Ireland is subject to the provisions of the Companies Act, 2014. This means that the company must provide certain information as a matter of course to the Companies Registration Office (CRO), and keep it up to date. This is true whether the company is for-profit or not-for-profit.
The CRO makes this information available to anybody who searches for it on its own website, and also licenses various data re-users, who republish the data – including information about company directors – on various commercial websites. Benefacts acquires up-to-date nonprofit company directors’ names from one of these data re-sellers.
The people responsible for the governance of a charity are called trustees. The directors of charities that are incorporated as companies are therefore both directors and trustees. Although it publishes them on its own website, the Charities Regulatory Authority does not yet provide the names of charity trustees in the open data file of extracts from the public register of charities, and for this reason they do not appear on benefacts.ie.
The names of directors or trustees on benefacts.ie are as up-to-date as we can make them. We rely on directors/trustees to notify their respective regulators when they have joined a board or retired from it, and we publish that information as soon as the regulator makes it available. We are aware that there can be a time lag between the registration of a change in director details and publication of this change by the registering authority. On request, Benefacts will redact the relevant detail pending the updating of the register.
Benefacts is very conscious of its responsibilities as a data processor, and we only hold information about the names of directors, and the dates they have joined and left a nonprofit board. We redact the addresses of the people who founded each nonprofit company from their constitutional documents, and we don’t receive or process any directors’ contact or address information. Read more about our privacy policy.
If you have any concerns about how your name appears on benefacts.ie, or you have any other questions or concerns about directors/trustees information that appears on our website, please contact us.
Further questions, concerns, ideas
If you have concerns about how the directory or governance data about Irish nonprofit organisations on benefacts.ie is collected, interpreted or presented, please contact us. We are also very interested to hear from anyone who has ideas about how this information could assist nonprofits or their stakeholders in making their work more accessible or transparent.